Amanda Lester and the Orange Crystal Crisis

  After lunch the first-years went to their crime lab class, which built upon the introductory course from last term. Professor Stegelmeyer, never a pussycat at the best of times, was surly and rumpled, which, given that he usually looked like a Marine, was almost alarming. Amanda’s lab partner this time was Dreidel Pomfritter, a kid she didn’t know very well. He seemed okay, at least so far. Short, with glasses and a dark brown crew cut, he was courteous and competent but not very interesting. Last term she had partnered with Nick and he’d been a blast—for a while, anyway. Come to think of it, maybe it was better that Dreidel wasn’t so much fun. Then she wouldn’t get attached or sidetracked and everything wouldn’t blow up again.

  After Crime Lab, Amanda betook herself to Headmaster Thrillkill’s office as requested. Surprise, surprise, he seemed distracted. She must have sat there for two minutes, during which time he barely looked at her. Then there was a knock at the door and Scapulus Holmes walked in, whistling. Amanda hated whistling. It was so Huck Finn. Not that there was anything wrong with Huck Finn per se. He was just so read-fifty-pages-by-Friday-and-then-we’ll-have-a-test, which she could do without.

  At last Thrillkill, glassy-eyed from the effort of staring at whatever had transfixed him, looked up from his computer. “Ah, Miss Lester, Mr. Holmes. Just the two people I want to see.” Well of course they were the people he wanted to see. He’d asked them there, hadn’t he? Come to think of it, Amanda wasn’t sure whether Thrillkill had invited Holmes or the boy was worming his way into her territory unbidden. But about thirty seconds later she found out.

  “I have a task for you two,” said Thrillkill. Them? Together? This didn’t sound good. “I want you to make a training film. You have thirty days.” Amanda couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Holmes make a film? With her? Why him? What could he possibly know about filmmaking? Then Thrillkill dropped a bombshell. “Miss Lester, I’m afraid you will have to postpone your storytelling class. There isn’t time to do both.”

  What?! That Holmes. This was all his fault. How dare he mess with the one thing she was excited about? What a waste of her talents—working on a training film with some newbie—a kid who wasn’t even there last term and couldn’t possibly know as much about anything as the rest of the first-years. It was an outrageous request. She felt like screaming.

  “Your topic is cyberforensics. I’ve made a list of the concepts I want you to cover. Please set a time to start work. I expect you to keep me up to date on your progress with a daily report. This is a critical project. Professor Redleaf needs all the help she can get. There’s too much important material for her to cover alone. Questions?”

  Amanda didn’t dare open her mouth for fear she’d lose control. Holmes simply shook his head and said, “No, sir. Thank you, sir.” How original.

  “Now then,” said Thrillkill, “I would like a project plan in forty-eight hours. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir,” they said in unison, although Amanda was looking at her feet when she spoke.

  “Good enough. Mr. Holmes, you are excused.” Mr. Holmes? What about me? “Miss Lester, I have another job for you.” Oh great. Now what?

  “Now I know this is going to be difficult, but I have complete confidence in you. You will do this because it’s critically important, and I know you will put the good of the school ahead of your personal feelings.” This did not sound promising. Amanda braced herself.

  “I would like you to help search Nick Muffet’s room. The school wants to reassess the damage he might have caused. Of course this won’t be the first time we’ve searched it, but we want to be even more thorough. I understand that this will be unpleasant for you, but you knew him better than anyone else. You may be able to spot important evidence the rest of us have missed. Miss Lester?” Amanda was looking down again. Thrillkill lowered his head and peered up at her, trying to catch her eye. It was a gesture of submission, an extremely rare one for him.

  It didn’t help. Amanda felt herself about to go ballistic. She was the last person who should be searching Nick’s room, and it wasn’t because girls weren’t normally allowed in the boys’ dorm. The idea was unthinkable. She couldn’t take one more blow. But how could she refuse? Thrillkill had a point. She was the best qualified and the detectives did need her help.

  But it would be excruciating, especially coming on the heels of the two things that had just occurred: losing her storytelling seminar and having to work with that kid. She wouldn’t just be searching through a bit of this and that. She would have to look through Nick’s most personal possessions.

  “When do you want me to do this?” Amanda said, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Right now,” said Thrillkill. “You don’t have any commitments at this instant, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Excellent. Let’s begin then, shall we?”

  Amanda and Thrillkill made their way to the boys’ dorm, which was situated in the southeast corner of the main building. As they entered, the headmaster placed himself in front of her and called out, “Girl in dorm. Make yourself decent,” then kept repeating his warning over and over. At one point she caught a glimpse of a boy in his underwear—one of the older students—but it was so quick that it barely registered. As they passed through, boys’ heads kept emerging from doorways and she could hear a lot of whispering. She had no idea whether the boys were simply curious or outright mocking her, but she was so miserable she didn’t care. Anyway, she’d been teased so much for being Lestrade’s descendant that insults didn’t bother her anymore—except when Nick had said those awful things. His vitriol had just about destroyed her.

  Nick’s room was on the top floor. Ever since the tragedy it had stood empty, his two roommates, Philip Puppybreath and Gavin Niven, having moved into David Wiffle’s room. Amanda could barely stand to look inside, let alone step over the threshold, but Thrillkill pushed in and she had no choice.

  The room was as neat as a pin, although Amanda wasn’t sure how a pin could be considered neat. She didn’t know if Nick or his roommates had kept things that way or the investigators had straightened everything up before they left. A Batman poster hung on the wall, presumably Nick’s, the roommates no doubt having removed whatever decoration they owned. Amanda could see holes in the wall where their pictures might have hung, although those might have been there for years.

  The room held three beds, two of them stripped bare. The third was covered with a heavy dark blue quilt with white shapes on it. It looked like the night sky. Amanda thought she could even see the Big Dipper. Nick had good taste.

  The room also held three small wooden dressers, three nightstands, three tiny desks, one of which supported a gooseneck lamp, and one not overly generous closet. An uncomfortable-looking wooden chair was nestled under each desk. A large window outfitted with flimsy drapes overlooked the expansive east side of the campus. The room was as bare bones as Amanda’s, and especially depressing because of its vacancy.

  “This is it,” said Thrillkill. “Let’s dig in.”

  It didn’t seem that there was much to dig into. The room was so bare that searching it seemed a futile exercise, but Amanda had to do something so she cast around for a suitable starting point.

  She didn’t want to look through Nick’s underwear, if he’d left any, so she started with the closet, which held several school uniforms, three pairs of shoes, a couple of jackets, four casual shirts, and an umbrella. Amanda felt all the pockets and looked inside them. They were empty except for bits of lint, a few pence, and a couple of five-pound notes. She was surprised that the crime scene investigators hadn’t removed the money. She looked toward the shelf but couldn’t reach it, so she grabbed a chair and climbed up.

  The top shelf was incredibly dusty. It looked as if it hadn’t been used in ages. That was weird. With space at such a premium, you’d think the boys would have used every nook and cranny, but they’d neglected to avail themselves of this valuable resource. It couldn’t have been because they we
re too short to reach it. Nick, at least, had been considerably taller than Amanda, who was five feet, and she was pretty sure that Philip and Gavin weren’t exactly shrimps either. Anyway, there were always chairs to climb onto, but maybe they just didn’t have a lot of stuff.

  “Find anything?” said Thrillkill, who was rummaging through one of the desks.

  “No, sir,” said Amanda, standing on her tiptoes. “It’s odd, though. This shelf hasn’t been used in months.”

  “Really? How peculiar. Now this is a good example of what to look for. What you fail to find can be just as important as what you uncover. That’s a lesson worth remembering.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are you sure there’s nothing up there?”

  “There’s a lot of dust,” Amanda said. That was true. The dust was so thick that Editta would have insisted on measuring it. “I—wait a minute. There’s some writing in the dust. Let me see if I can make it out.”

  “Do you need a torch?” said Thrillkill, reaching into his coat pocket.

  “I have a light on my phone,” said Amanda. “Let me get it.” She started to get down but Thrillkill was faster. He grabbed her bag and handed it up to her.

  “Thank you, sir.” She took out her phone and activated the light. “It’s . . . oh.”

  “What is it?” he said.

  “It says, ‘Dust me.’”

  Thrillkill laughed. Amanda didn’t think she’d ever seen him do that. “Typical,” he said. “They manage to get up there to write in the dust, but heaven forfend they should actually clean the shelf.”

  “Sir, don’t you think it might mean more than that? I mean the writing.”

  “You think it’s a code?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just trying to keep an open mind.”

  “Excellent, Miss Lester. Please take pictures of the shelf from a variety of angles and let’s get a sample of the dust. The crime scene people have already looked for prints and didn’t find anything that shouldn’t be there, but it doesn’t hurt to do that again.”

  Amanda processed the shelf using her evidence kit, then turned her attention to the desks. She thought she’d start with the two that probably weren’t Nick’s. The longer she could delay going through any more of his personal things the better. If she stalled enough, maybe Thrillkill would abort the mission and she wouldn’t have to endure the pain of such intimacy.

  Not surprisingly, neither of the two desks near the empty beds held anything other than lint. Philip and Gavin must have cleaned those out pretty thoroughly. However when she came to the third, she almost couldn’t open the drawers, and not because of her feelings about Nick. They were all stuck. She had to wiggle the top one to move it at all, but when she finally got it free she saw that it was empty.

  The second of the three drawers was just as stuck but it was not empty. Inside Amanda found a printed copy of a screenplay entitled “Thaddeus Bott and the Magic Fog.” Nick Muffet was listed as the author. It appeared to be a steampunk story he had written, and from the first few lines it looked darn good. She wondered briefly why he hadn’t mentioned it, but then realized he’d never told her the truth about anything so of course he wouldn’t have. She felt as if she’d been kicked in the stomach—again.

  Now to the bottom drawer. Like the first two, this one did not want to open, but it was even more stuck. Amanda couldn’t tell if it was blocked or there was something wrong with the sliders.

  “Having trouble?” said Thrillkill.

  “I can’t get the drawer open.”

  “That’s odd. Perhaps the humidity . . .” He yanked on the drawer but it wouldn’t open for him either. “Blasted thing. Come on, you.” He pulled harder and harder, until all of a sudden the drawer gave way and he fell back on his butt. Amanda wanted to laugh. This was certainly not a position she’d ever seen the headmaster assume. He, however, was unperturbed and said, “There you go, Miss Lester. Have at it.”

  Thrillkill had pulled the drawer completely out of the desk and Amanda could see that it held an evidence kit full of sample bags, tweezers, a fingerprint kit, and so on—all the items found in every detective’s toolkit. In addition, she found the results of the fingerprint exercise she and Nick had conducted that very first day of Crime Lab. There were also some tools, including a hammer, pliers, screwdriver, and Allen wrench. Nick had been handy. It wasn’t surprising that he’d owned his own tools.

  Amanda dusted all the items for prints, including the screenplay. She would run them through the national database later. She also swabbed everything in case there was any residue that might help paint a better picture of what the Moriartys had been up to. But on the surface none of the stuff looked suspicious.

  Then came the dressers. She wasn’t looking forward to them. What if Nick had left underwear? That was way too personal, although it crossed her mind to wonder whether criminals’ underwear looked different from other people’s. Dirtier? Torn? With secret compartments? With pictures of spiders or skulls and crossbones on them?

  Reasoning that he would have stored such items in the top drawer, she started at the bottom. The lowest drawer contained a few pairs of jeans, which were folded more neatly than she would have expected. Not exactly come-from-the-dry-cleaners folded, but better than most kids would do. She lifted each pair out and examined it thoroughly, cringing all the while. She found a couple of clean handkerchiefs in the pockets, plus a wrapper from some crackers. She remembered the time Nick had offered her saltines and put the wrapper back in his pocket. Could it be the same one? If so, it had been there an awfully long time. There was no way. She was letting her emotions run away with her.

  The drawer itself contained some lint but was otherwise clean. With Thrillkill’s help, she removed it from the dresser and looked to see if there was anything attached, or any secret compartments. Nothing. The floor underneath was also free of evidence, so she replaced the jeans and the two of them reinserted the drawer.

  Next she pulled out the middle drawer. There she found an array of sweaters, which her English friends called jumpers, a word she thought rather peculiar, but then calling cookies biscuits was also strange. She had seen Nick wear every one of these and didn’t like looking at them. But the results of this search were the same as the previous one: nothing interesting.

  Unfortunately, she had now reached the top drawer. She was tempted to ask Thrillkill to search it for her, but he’d insisted that she look so she figured she’d better do so. Slowly, slowly she pulled the drawer open. Of course she’d been right. It was full of underwear and socks. She thought she’d die. Handle these? She’d never even touched her father’s underwear. How could she possibly feel—feel—Nick’s. She hoped he’d kept it all clean, because she really, really didn’t want to deal with it if it wasn’t.

  She could feel herself start to gag. Luckily she had a couple of gingersnaps with her. She’d begun carrying them everywhere when Simon had discovered that they settled the stomach. Since she was so prone to puking, they’d been a godsend. She popped one in her mouth and waited a minute for it to descend. She was still upset but the nausea was subsiding. Hands shaking, she pulled the drawer out all the way and looked inside.

  The first thing she realized was that Nick was indeed well organized. Whether it was his show business training (where had he gotten that anyway?) or just came naturally, it was a relief. All his Y-fronts, T-shirts, and socks were clean and neatly arranged. She breathed a sigh of relief, although her hands were still shaking. She removed each item and examined it thoroughly.

  She was able to get the drawer out by herself this time, but when she turned it over, she got a shock. There was something taped underneath—a white letter-sized envelope. She felt underneath the tape and pulled, then squeezed the envelope. Whatever was inside was small, hard, and flat. She opened the envelope to find a memory card. What could that be for?

  She gave Thrillkill the card, although she would have preferred to take it to her room and look at it by
herself. If it was embarrassing, she might be able to forestall the worst of the teachers’ reactions. Her mind raced with terrifying possibilities. She had to know but she didn’t want to. What if, what if, what if?

  After a quick search of the other two dressers, which were completely empty and free of secret stashes, Amanda stared at the bed. She was no more comfortable riffling through this than Nick’s underwear. It was the most personal item of all and she was dreading it. She considered asking Thrillkill if she could skip it but she knew what the answer would be.

  She started by looking underneath. There she saw more dust, but unlike the dust on the closet shelf, no evidence of its having been disturbed. She took a couple of samples and stashed them in her bag. She examined the underside of the box spring, crawling under the bed (which precipitated a lot of sneezing) to feel carefully. Nothing there either.

  Then, trembling, she gently pulled back the quilt. She examined it top and bottom, side to side. She lay it on the floor and pressed it. Nothing. It was just a quilt. She extracted a scissors from her evidence kit and started to cut. Snip, snip, snip. It was torture invading the blanket Nick had pulled over himself every night. With each snip, she felt as if she were cutting herself. She cut and cut and cut until the poor thing was in ribbons but found nothing unusual. Still, she took a couple of pieces for analysis, just in case.

  When she had finished destroying, er, searching the quilt, she turned back to the bed. It held the usual bedclothes: a pillow in a case, a blanket, plain white sheets. Amanda pulled back each of the layers to find nothing special. Then, with the same result, the pillow and its case.

  When she had removed the pad that underlay the sheets, she stared at the mattress. In the middle was a Nick-shaped depression. She felt as if she would burst into tears. Of course the dent could have been the result of various boys sleeping on the bed over the years, but in Amanda’s eyes Nick had created it. She blinked and tried to regain her composure. Then, after a few seconds, she leaned down and started to palpate the mattress, carefully moving along an imaginary grid. Nothing. She knelt and did the same to each of the sides. Still nothing. Now there was only the side that faced the wall. She kneed the mattress away to make room for herself and squatted to feel there too. Right side, nothing. Left side, nothing. Middle—what was that? Something weird was there, sticking out from underneath. It made a crinkling sound when she pressed it.